The Greek government is accepting the overwhelming majority of
the deal just rejected at its referendum, and it will get no
up-front debt relief.

The government will have to run primary budget surpluses, cut
pensions, and make significant structural reforms (like raising
the pension age), all in exchange for about €53.5 billion (£38.57
billion, $59.44 billion).

In short, it's exactly the sort of deal that the Syriza party
railed against before taking control, and for several months of
governance. The Wall Street Journal has
the whole 13-page proposal here. A quick read confirms it
does not seem to be the sort of document a radical leftist would
approve of.

Here's how Deutsche Bank's George Saravelos characterises the
deal on the table:

In significant parts, the new Greek submission now follows the
spirit of the Juncker text published by the European Commission
just after the talks broke down. The fiscal targets are the same,
and the proposed mix of fiscal consolidation has shifted away
from tax increases to spending cuts as required by the creditors.
The VAT reform proposals are now very similar with some small
differences in the phasing in of increases in islands. Pension
cuts go deeper, with a broad-based increase in a "healthcare
surcharge" for pensioners to the level that the institutions were
requesting and immediate changes to early retirement rules.

The deal isn't done yet. Saravelos notes that there are still
some sticking points, but overall this looks much more like a
platform for an agreement before July 20, when Greece's next debt
repayment is due to the European Central Bank.

Given what has actually been conceded, and the turmoil Greece has
been through in recent months, it's very hard to judge the period
to have been much more than a huge waste of time and resources.
As
Business Insider's Lianna Brinded noted, it makes the bailout
referendum conducted less than a week ago look pointless.

Here's how yields on Greek bonds with a 10-year maturity have
moved over time. In short, lower yields mean a bond is judged to
be more secure, and higher yields mean the opposite:

Yields since then have climbed, not quite to the highs of the
euro crisis, but to levels way above those seen last summer. With
government debt seen as increasingly risky, Greece is much
further away from regaining access to financial markets than it
previously was.

The cruel irony of that is that Syriza has left the country
further away from independent market access — which would have
allowed it to issue debt once again — so the country will be
relying on Schaeuble's dubious generosity for years to come.

It's difficult to blame Greece for electing Syriza. The country's
economy has been shattered, with an economic collapse more like
the Great Depression of the 1930s than the recessions in Western
Europe and the United States since the 2008 crisis.

The recovery under the previous government was the fastest in the
eurozone — but that isn't much of an accolade. Greece would have
faced years, decades of modest recovery to get back to the
economy it had in 2008. That was understandably, not an exciting
prospect.

Happier
times: Supporters of opposition leader and head of the radical
leftist Syriza party Alexis Tsipras at exit-poll results in
Athens on January 25.Marko
Djurica/Reuters

Unemployment was still close to 25%, with youth unemployment
twice that, and the recovery was nowhere to be seen in wages. To
add to that, Syriza is
basically right about the country's debt situation, and it
has a strong case that major austerity measures have been
self-defeating.

And there's a sense that Greeks more than anything else just
wanted a government that stood on its own two feet — no country
wants to feel as if it's someone else's whipping boy. That more
than anything else seems to have been the driving force behind
Syriza's electoral support and the overwhelming "no" vote on
Sunday's referendum.

But while it's an understandable impulse, it seems to have
produced very little in terms of concrete gains. Greece's
unspectacular but real recovery has been snuffed out. Its banks
are closed and even more structurally damaged than they were
before, and many government contractors have been running on
empty, basically unpaid, for months now.

All that for a deal that, to outside eyes, looks little different
from the 2010 and 2012 bailouts the country already had.